note 29955 modified in function.array-multisort by vrana

I also tried dealing with sorting a multidim array and had some rather... let's say funny experiences with it (to be honest, I almost threw my keyboard out of the windows...). Okay, the situation: I had an array, made up as follows: array ( [0] => array ( "size" => value, "rate" => value,...) [1] => array ( "size" => value, ...) ... ) Now, I wanted to sort them lets say by the value of "size". I tried the suggestions above, but none worked (in fact, nothing happend, at least if PHP didn't complain about wrong syntax). So I did make up a sort manually: $ortarr=array($array[0][$column],$array[1][$column],...); array_multisort($ortarr, $array); This worked pretty fine. Then I tried a foreach loop: <?php $i=0; foreach($array as $row){ $t = $array[$row][$column]; array_push($sortarr, $t); $i++; } ?> Comparison of the manual array and the array made up by foreach gave, they were identical. But - the last one didn't work. And, even more interesting: Sorting by $ortarray only worked, if the loop was commented out; if it wasn't, even $ortarray didn't work... And this weird behaviour almost drove me mad... But then I tried an even more simple way: <?php function csort($array, $column){ $i=0; for($i=0; $i<count($array); $i++){ $sortarr[]=$array[$i][$column]; } array_multisort($sortarr, $array); return($array); } ?> And, finally, it works. But up to now I couldn't figure out neither what was the mistake of the first ones nor why the hints from above didn't work... Next would be trying to do a sort for arrays whose toplevel keys aren't integer but strings... --was-- I also tried dealing with sorting a multidim array and had some rather... let's say funny experiences with it (to be honest, I almost threw my keyboard out of the windows...). Okay, the situation: I had an array, made up as follows: array ( [0] => array ( "size" => value, "rate" => value,...) [1] => array ( "size" => value, ...) ... ) Now, I wanted to sort them lets say by the value of "size". I tried the suggestions above, but none worked (in fact, nothing happend, at least if PHP didn't complain about wrong syntax). So I did make up a sort manually: $ortarr=array($array[0][$column],$array[1][$column],...); array_multisort($ortarr, $array); This worked pretty fine. Then I tried a foreach loop: $i=0; foreach($array as $row){ $t = $array[$row][$column]; array_push($sortarr, $t); $i++; } Comparison of the manual array and the array made up by foreach gave, they were identical. But - the last one didn't work. And, even more interesting: Sorting by $ortarray only worked, if the loop was commented out; if it wasn't, even $ortarray didn't work... And this weird behaviour almost drove me mad... But then I tried an even more simple way: function csort($array, $column){ $i=0; for($i=0; $i<count($array); $i++){ $sortarr[]=$array[$i][$column]; } array_multisort($sortarr, $array); return($array); } And, finally, it works. But up to now I couldn't figure out neither what was the mistake of the first ones nor why the hints from above didn't work... Next would be trying to do a sort for arrays whose toplevel keys aren't integer but strings... http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-multisort.php